Falseness

Lucy Potter has an angry, cynical and jealous personality due to her upbringing and mistreatment by her parents. But one advantage of possessing these personality traits is that she has a keen sense for the genuine and little patience for what she regards as falseness. Throughout the book, Lucy longs for genuine connection and loathes situations in which some express false intimacy with others. In one such case, Lucy observes Lewis licking Mariah's neck, and the two of them embracing. But she immediately perceived a profound distance between them, a distance she found shocking given their embrace. In another case, Lucy expresses disgust with Dinah (not to her directly) because Dinah is vain and hides her envy of Mariah's life, pretending to be kind and exciting.

In Chapter 2, which concerns Mariah, Lucy finds it incomprehensible that someone could be as happy as Mariah seemed to be. Lucy found...